Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies, UPF. María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence.

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ABSTRACT
A study plan is the choice of concepts and the organization and sequencing of the concepts to be covered in an educational course. While a good study plan is essential for the success of any course offering, the design of study plans currently remains largely a manual task. We present a novel data-driven method, which given a list of concepts can automatically propose candidate plans to cover all the concepts. Our method uses Wikipedia as an external source of knowledge to both identify which concepts should be studied together and how students should move from one group of concepts to another. For our experimental validation, we synthesize study plan for a course defined by a list of concept names from high school physics. Our user study with domain experts finds that our method is able to produce a study plan of high quality.

SHORT BIO:

Rakesh Agrawal is the President and Founder of the Data Insights Laboratories. He is a member of National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE. He has been both an IBM Fellow and a Microsoft Fellow. ACM SIGKDD awarded him its inaugural Innovations Award and ACM SIGMOD the Edgar F. Codd Award. He was named to the Scientific American’s First list of top 50 Scientists. Rakesh has been granted 85+ patents and published 200+ papers, including the 1st and 2nd highest cited in databases and data mining. Four of his papers have received “test-of-time” awards. His papers have received more than 100,000 citations and his H-Index is 96. His research formed the nucleus of IBM Intelligent Miner that led the creation of data mining as a new software category. Besides Intelligent Miner, several other commercial products incorporate his work, including IBM DB2 and WebSphere and Microsoft Bing.

Seminar collocated with the International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM2016). ICDM2016 takes place in Barcelona in Dec 12-15 2016 and is co-organized by Prof. Ricardo Baeza Yates (NTENT & DTIC-UPF).

As part of the PhD training seminars of the Department, Ricardo Baeza and Rakesh Agrawal will discuss with PhD students about research careers in industry (15:30h - 16:00h, auditorium).